I looked for a simple tutorial to learn Netbeans RCP step by step but I found only the "quick start" guide of Netbeans. Does someone know a simple tutorial with some simple examples? I rarely use Netbeans, the guide shows many menus :s Is there a tutorial closer to the source code?

Sorry to refresh this old thread. I would like to use Netbeans RCP but without using Netbeans as an IDE. I know some people succeeded in using Netbeans RCP in IDEA IntelliJ, I would like to do the same but in Eclipse, I found nothing about that after some long research. Is it possible?

Some people might tell me "why don't you simply use Eclipse RCP?". Actually, I use Eclipse RCP at work. To sum up, it looks like "Write once, debug everywhere" even though some customers like the "native" look and feel. I'm fed up with problems of sync between SWT, AWT and Swing components, I don't want to do the same thing for JFPSM, I just want to use a rich client platform based on Swing and Netbeans RCP seems the way to go but I don't feel comfortable in Netbeans.

I use NetBeans RCP a lot. The Praxis framework is based around the NetBeans runtime container, and Praxis LIVE is a NetBeans RCP application.

I'm sure earlier today you had a link to Geertjan's blog in this post! While I would normally steer clear of the NetBeans vs Eclipse vs whatever arguments, if you want to develop for the platform I would agree with some of the comments on that blog post and recommend using NetBeans. While using another IDE is of course possible, you will miss a huge amount of integration between the IDE and the RCP - wizards, branding configuration, window system editor, integrated build and test system, visual editors, "layers" editor etc. There are some major time savers in there - you will learn to be comfortable with NetBeans faster than you'll do most of those tasks without it!

I do what I can. I'm not a big fan of Eclipse but despite my efforts, I don't feel fine in Netbeans. Personally I don't need any WYSIWYG editor; I don't deny Matisse is a time saver but it is not mandatory.

My project is IDE-agnostic, I try to make it work in Eclipse, Netbeans and why not BlueJ. I assume that Netbeans RCP contains some things coming from abandoned JRE concerning installation and packaging, Swing framework, etc... It is quite difficult to do it with Maven, to handle the dependencies so that I don't have to put them directly inside my own project...

Do I have the right to put Netbeans RCP JARs into my project? It is under GPL V2 as far as I know. Thank you very much. Best regards.

Actually, I would like to avoid putting all Netbeans RCP JARs into my project, maybe by using Maven or Ant.

You just include the JARs (modules) you need in your application. Again, there is a GUI for this built in to the IDE, which handles dependency management. It's possible outside of the IDE by building a list of excluded modules in one of the configuration files.

The NetBeans build system is Ant by default. I know people have also built platform apps with Maven, though haven't myself. The Ant build system should work outside the IDE, but there are some custom tasks which will need to be in the Ant classpath.

I do what I can. I'm not a big fan of Eclipse but despite my efforts, I don't feel fine in Netbeans. Personally I don't need any WYSIWYG editor; I don't deny Matisse is a time saver but it is not mandatory.

I've done cross IDE Netbeans RCP in the past (also in IntelliJ Idea). At the time I started, there was not very much available in Netbeans to support RCP development, so I set up my own Ant based build system. It worked out quite well, but when Netbeans IDE support catched up, I sincerly regretted not to have these new tools available!

So I would go with Mix'n'Match - change the Netbeans key shortcuts to Eclipse, use the Netbeans Wizardry to create your basic project and start Netbeans up, everytime you need to configure or change your projects' structure (e.g. adding Modules) or branding.

I would also recommend to use Netbeans to create, modify and wire the GUI components - at least the ones that directly relate to the RCPs Windowing System - like Editors, Navigators, Explorers and TopComponents. There is some serious amount of knowledge, boilerplate code and convention in there, that greatly reduce the effort to get things done. It also prevents you from hitting some pitfalls, reinvent the wheel or introducing usage inconsistencies with the rest of the plattform.

For everything else, use Eclipse if you need to...

To share the project between Netbeans and Eclipse, I probably would try to use the Netbeans Plattform Support for Maven (Quickstart, Article), but haven't used it til now - it may be incomplete, and the M2 plugin for Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/m2e/). Importing Maven projects (even hierarchical multimodule ones) usually works quite well with the current versions.

Sorry to refresh this thread. I started to use Netbeans RCP at work a few days ago and I still don't like Netbeans. Therefore, I will try to use Eclipse but cylab is right about the pitfalls and the respect of conventions. I don't succeed in getting rid of layer.xml :s

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